Adam Weinberg is stepping down from New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art right after two decades as its director, the New York Situations reports. Scott Rothkopf, who is currently the institution’s senior deputy director and the Nancy and Steve Crown Relatives Main Curator, will acquire the reins from Weinberg on November 1. For the duration of his directorship, Weinberg shepherded the museum as a result of its shift from its longtime Upper East Aspect Brutalist digs to its ethereal, present day present house in New York’s stylish Meatpacking District. He also weathered the Covid-19 disaster, which observed the museum shutter briefly and lay off staff members, and the rise of Black Lives Issue, which led to struggles as the institution tried to embrace range.
Staff also unionized at the museum throughout Weinberg’s tenure the union arrived at a agreement with management just this 7 days. As very well, Weinberg steered the museum by the tumultuous departure of board vice chair Warren Kanders spurred in component by an post in this journal limning his relationship to tear gasoline maker Safariland.
The Instances noted that the go is not unforeseen, offered that Weinberg is sixty-8 and Rothkopf forty-6. The succession demonstrates a generational transforming of the guard that is getting area throughout the artwork earth, with white male curators of the little one boom era yielding to users of Era X or millennials, as embodied for illustration by forty-five-yr-old Christopher Bedford’s remaining preferred to thrive sixty-eight-12 months-aged Neal Benezra at the San Francisco Museum of Artwork or forty-a person-year-outdated Sasha Suda’s being tapped to guide the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork immediately after seventy-year-previous Timothy Rub stepped down.
Characterizing Weinberg as “a once-in-a-life span director” and Rothkopf as “an agent of change,” Fern Kaye Tessler, president of the Whitney’s board of trustees, explained to the Periods, “We have an prospect to have a seamless transition.”
The Harvard-educated Rothkopf, a former Artforum senior editor, left the magazine in 2009 to become a curator at the Whitney he rose by means of the ranks with numerous promotions in swift succession, turning out to be deputy director in 2018. Rothkopf is recognised for his close liaisons with artists and has been instrumental in diversifying the museum’s workers. Among the the exhibitions he has arranged at the Whitney are surveys of the operate of Jeff Koons, Jasper Johns, and Laura Owens.
“One of the good items about an inside succession like this is we can continue on the operate we’ve been executing with fairness and inclusion—thinking about our neighborhood and the metropolis,” he informed the Situations. “We have a huge curatorial staff and most of them I have hired, so it is not like someone who comes and states, ‘How do I modify this? How do I make this my individual?’”
